Border Crossings
by Janet Marugg
It was the map makers that gave Imperialists a border to cross, lands and populations to conquer. The cartographers didn’t know the role they played in historic military maneuvers, the role they played in the creation of empires. Their lines, their lovely attention to details, their masterpieces, were used to conquer and collect. Map makers were the vector for the relentless plague of capitalism.
There are 7.7 billion strangers on earth, divided by imaginary lines, sectioned off and therefore made more easily exploited. There are 325.7 million US citizens who believe they are free.
From Ptolemy’s Geographica, he knows his latitudinal place. Solace, Idaho, is right on the earth’s 45th north parallel, he has spun on the earth’s axis 28,336 km today. He should be tired.
#
These are the things Elliot thought about after turning off his flashlight. Even in the dark he saw his breath cloud, so he burrowed deeper into the blanket pile. His mother forgot to pay the bills again. He hadn’t seen her in two days but wasn’t worried just yet. Her record absence was five days when Elliot was nine.
“I’m teaching you to be independent,” she’d slurred through the sour mash. Elliot survived.
In the morning, he ate food-bank chili out of the can while he gathered things from cupboards and put them in the refrigerator to protect them from freezing. Subzero temperatures are a powerful thing. It can bulge cans, split rocks, swell the earth to the point of fissures. Cold can kill an unmoved man.
Then he climbed into the school bus, into the moist warmth, imagined it was like stepping into the shower, like back when they had hot water, imagined it was like stepping into the tropics. If Elliot was at the equator, where the earth’s circumference was the greatest, he would travel 417.46 km with the earth’s surface in the fifteen-minute bus ride to school.
He always sat behind Mr. Bunce, the seat reserved for special needs students. The rectangle of Mr. B.’s rearview mirror was full of the kids Elliot had known his whole life; kids too different to talk to him.
In the warmth he studied his own reflection. That face looked like every other dirt road kid ready to offer a confession for a religion-challenged future. Life had failed his test for testimony and he could not force a faith that anything was going to work out. His uncombed hair the color of pine bark framed his acned cheeks. Even he could see the caginess in his gray eyes, feel the urge to pace in his legs.
“Whatdya know, Elliot?” Mr. B. waited until Elliot’s teeth stopped chattering. It was a game they played.
“At the 45th parallel we’ll spin two hundred ninety-five kilometers on our way to school,” Elliot said.
“Hope that don’t show on the odometer. The Super wouldn’t be liking that.” Always the same from Mr. B.. Repetition was a price Elliot’s paid for physical warmth and conversation.
The Education Center was a campus of two craftsman brick buildings chain-linked into a treeless lot. Kindergarten through fifth grades were in the smaller building, sixth grade through high school in the larger. Elliot was moved to the larger building during Kindergarten. Only adults talk to him there.
In the converted library, he sat at a carrel and used a computer to take college classes. He knew that Mrs. Grevy had pulled strings at the Department of Education to make that happen. He also knew she took up a collection for Elliot’s tuition and school supplies. Elliot hacked as a hobby and in that way had made himself privy to these facts. He also looked at student grades, teacher evaluations, and the content of interagency emails. From these, he was often shocked at the teachers’ ability to go about their day.
Elliot lost himself in Global Climate Change (GEOG 313) and Sustainability of Natural Resources (GEOG 321) until Mr. Vandack waddled in with the cold stuck on his coat. Mr. Vandack was a retired teacher and current part-time Mayor of Solace who supplemented his income as Elliot’s proxy. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, they had lunch together, the only days that Elliot ate in the cafeteria. Mayor Vandack’s gaze stayed on the table between them, a mammalian trait, tens of millions of years in the making.
Mayor Vandack was an over-consumer, half as round as he was tall. He lied about everything Elliot’s future would hold. Dirt road kids didn’t win Pulitzers. Nobody was going to be pinning Elliot’s portrait on Pinterest or rushing to create a Wikipedia entry detailing Elliot’s profound endeavors and contributions to humankind.
In the afternoons, Elliot was free to travel the world because Mrs. Grevy spent her entire library budget on atlases. Small town teachers were always keen on showing the lines of the world to students. But most afternoons he spent writing his manifesto he considered his half of an obscure prophecy. And he looked out the window. He was surrounded by mountain ranges that serrated an unlimited blue sky. Mountains, he wrote, were a better boundary than two-dimensional lines on paper. Between the mountains there was the Great Basin Desert where infinite boredom smelled of cows, sage, rock and sky. The desert contained the subterranean roots of humility.
At three o’clock he found Mr. B. in the bus at the curb. After the Leaving Solace, Population 3112 sign, Elliot counted fence posts and huddled heads of cattle, their breath a collective cloud. In his mirror, Mr. B. watched the boy with the brain while Elliot figured lot sizes and cattle per lot. By 1900, the government had divvied up the Great Basin and people rushed to plant fences. Not satisfied by the borders that map makers drew, they created their own boundaries with barbed wire.
“You doin’ alright?” Mr. B. met Elliot’s eyes in the rearview mirror, hoped he sounded like he was just making polite conversation. People are proud.
“Me? Sure.” Elliot offered a practiced grin.
At subdivisions with names like Solace Springs and Paradise Ridge, Elliot watched the kids disembark the bus, tug at each other, race up concrete driveways and disappear into split-levels strung with Christmas lights. Mr. B. let all the kids off the bus before turning onto the dirt stretch of Canyon Road where he aimed for the handful of trailers at the end.
“Need anything?” Mr. B. ran out of time to beat around the bush.
“Nope.” Elliot lied, stepped off the warm bus and pulled his head down into his collar against the cold. He walked past the row of sandblasted mailboxes in front of Mrs. Quiggley’s trailer. Her son was living with her again, tools strewn around a rust brown Chevy truck on blocks. The Pretenders were blaring on a boombox, a song about going back to Ohio…all those favorite places…but there was nobody around.
As hungry as Elliot always was, he was not a thief, had never shoplifted from Nick’s Supply, but when he saw the Klein wire cutters just lying there, he jammed them under his coat. They were cold through his tee shirt as he ran to the last trailer in the row. His mother’s Cutlass was still absent, and he wasn’t surprised.
Elliot stood at the kitchen sink and ate canned peaches for dinner. December was dark by five o’clock at the 45th north parallel. He slipped out, pumped air into cold bicycle tires, and peddled past the work light, past the young Quiggley’s legs now sticking out from under the Chevy. 4 Non Blonds were screaming from the top of their lungs “What’s Going On?” The moon looked like a pale red penny and turned the stubbled grass near the road into a tender beige. That anarchy to grow beyond borders in a heartless land emboldened him.
Those delicate lines, so carefully penciled by cartographers were bad, but the strung fences slicing up the purple sage were hideous. Elliot cut carefully, strategically. No car-to-cattle accidents if he was careful. It would be a good start to let the cattle mingle, to slow the maniacal drive to enclose and encase, a good start to throw a wrench in the oily cog, a good start to erase borders.
Borders were the story that killed people a little with every word, turned people into something they weren’t, slow and certain as death, and he was alive, armed with wire cutters and equal to the terrors of the day.
Janet Marugg lives and writes in Clarkston, Washington, aka the Gateway to Hells Canyon – the deepest canyon in North America – yep, deeper than the Grand. The elevation is only 742 above sea level and the older I get, the more I appreciate the mild climate of the North West’s very own Banana Belt. The mild winters support my love of gardening, hiking, kayaking, paddle boarding, reading and writing. I live with my husband, Ed, and our dog, Luna. I am an active member of the Idaho Writers League though I do claim and enjoy my Washington State zip code.